EMSTEEL: Abu Dhabi’s Heavy Industry Bet

Abu Dhabi’s largest steelmaker has not been called Emirates Steel Arkan since 9 September 2024. It is
EMSTEEL.

That is not pedantry — it is the first of about ten things that most descriptions of this company get
wrong, including its legal name, who owns it, which regulator supervises it, and which of its two headline
production numbers is which.

Here is the company as its own filings describe it.

The name, and the entity behind it

The rebrand was announced on 9 September 2024 at an Abu Dhabi event. But the brand name and the legal
name are different things, and this is where even Wikipedia goes wrong.

The trading brand is EMSTEEL, listed on the Abu Dhabi Securities Exchange under the ticker EMSTEEL. The
registered legal name is EMSTEEL Building Materials PJSC — not “EMSTEEL PJSC”.

The “Building Materials” survives for a reason worth understanding: the listed vehicle is the former
Arkan Building Materials Company PJSC, renamed rather than replaced. A separate Emirates Steel Industries
Co. PJSC still exists inside the group. The steel business was merged into the building-materials
listing, which is why the cement half is not an afterthought but the surviving legal skeleton.

Who owns it

ADQ holds 87.5% directly, with a 12.5% free float.

You will frequently read that ADQ owns it “through its industrial subsidiary Senaat”. That is history,
not the present. EMSTEEL’s own ownership page attributes the stake to ADQ itself and places Senaat — the
General Holding Corporation — in the past: Senaat transferred to ADQ in March 2020, and Arkan joined ADQ’s
portfolio through it. Our profile of
ADQ under the L’IMAD
reorganisation covers the holding company above it.

And who regulates it

Not the Securities and Commodities Authority. The regulator was renamed the UAE Capital Market
Authority with effect from 1 January 2026 — and the proof is mechanical: sca.gov.ae now
redirects to uaecma.gov.ae.

Two domain traps are worth flagging, because both will catch a careless reader.
emsteel.ae is a different, unrelated company — a Sharjah commercial-kitchen and stainless
steel fabricator. The steel group is emsteel.com. And cma.gov.ae is not the Capital Market
Authority; it is the Creative Media Authority in Abu Dhabi, which regulates twofour54. The
securities regulator is uaecma.gov.ae.

How it was assembled

We are giving 2007 without a month deliberately: the company’s own ownership page says January and its
own journey page says February.

What it makes, and the number people misread

Two divisions — Emirates Steel and Emirates Cement, the latter covering the Al Ain Cement Factory,
Emirates Blocks Factories, ANABEEB and Arkan Bags. Sixteen plants in total.

Capacity and sales volume are different measures and are constantly conflated. Note also that the
cement capacity sits at Al Ain, not at Musaffah — a detail that gets scrambled because the group is
headquartered in Musaffah, within Abu Dhabi Industrial City, where it describes its steel plant as “the
only full-fledged integrated steel manufacturing facility in the UAE”.

The steel catalogue is rebar, ES600 high-performance rebar, wire rod, heavy sections, sheet piles, steel
billets and rebar in coils. It does not make hot-rolled coil — “rebar in coils” is a
different product, and the word “coil” misleads people into assuming otherwise.

Exports reach more than 70 markets and account for around 30% of sales. The company claims 60% of the
UAE steel market and 11% of Abu Dhabi’s manufacturing output.

The bet is not tonnage

Here is the most revealing fact in the whole file. Steel capacity reached 3.5 million tonnes in
September 2012 and has been flat ever since.

Fourteen years without a capacity expansion, in a country that has built almost everything else at
speed. Whatever this company is betting on, it is not making more steel. It is making steel that can be
sold into markets that are starting to price carbon.

TrueGreen, launched on 25 September 2025, is the green steel proposition — emission
intensity of 0.67 tonnes of CO2 per tonne of steel, with independently verified environmental product
declarations, positioned explicitly against the EU’s Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism. EMSTEEL was the
first company in MENA to earn ResponsibleSteel certification and will host the first ResponsibleSteel Forum
in the region, in Abu Dhabi, in 2027.

Underneath it sit two pieces of real engineering. The company’s direct reduction plant is linked to
ADNOC’s Al Reyadah carbon capture facility, which in EMSTEEL’s own words “processes the
CO2 captured from our DRP operations” — making it, on the careful formulation the company itself uses in
its more precise releases, the first steelmaker in the world to capture part of its CO2
emissions.

And in October 2024 it announced, with Masdar,
the successful completion of a green-hydrogen direct-reduced-iron pilot — first of its kind in the Middle
East, at 2.1MW producing 40 kg an hour, with the hydrogen certified under ISO 19870 and validated by Bureau
Veritas. The company says green hydrogen could cut steelmaking CO2 by up to 95%.

It also claims 45% lower carbon intensity than the global average, with clean energy above 80% of
operations as at 2023. Its low-carbon rebar was used by Aldar for Abu Dhabi’s first net-zero carbon mosque
on Yas Island.

Where the steel goes

Into the national build-out, mostly. EMSTEEL supplied nuclear-grade steel to the Barakah plant from
September 2013, and is a supplier to Etihad Rail — more than 80,000 tonnes of cement for the passenger
project alone.

That direction matters: EMSTEEL supplies Etihad Rail, rather than Etihad Rail serving the Musaffah
plant. Several write-ups have it backwards. Our guides to
Etihad Rail freight and
AD Ports Group cover
the logistics side of the same industrial base.

The numbers

In the first half of 2026 revenue reached AED 4.6 billion with EBITDA of AED 941 million, up 74% year on
year. The margin expansion, rather than the top line, is the story — consistent with a company competing on
product quality and carbon intensity rather than volume.

The group is led by chief executive Eng. Saeed Ghumran Al Remeithi, appointed in August 2012 as the
first UAE national to lead Emirates Steel, with Hamad Al Hammadi as chairman. Investors can follow it on
ADX — our guide to
how the exchange works
covers the mechanics.

A closing note on record-keeping

EMSTEEL’s own investor-relations archive is broken. Its live financial statements and AGM pages still
link dozens of historic PDFs to emiratessteelarkan.com — a domain that is now completely dead. Every Arkan
annual report linked there is unreachable.

Its subsidiaries page also still reads that EMSTEEL “is part of Arkan Building Materials”, two years
after the rebrand it announced itself.

We have spent this month documenting UAE government pages that had not caught up with their own law
changes. It is worth recording that the private sector does exactly the same thing — and that a company’s
own website is a source to be checked, not a source of truth.

Primary sources, all EMSTEEL’s own: the
rebrand
announcement of 9 September 2024; its
corporate
governance page carrying the registered legal name; its
ownership
structure;
about the company;
its company
timeline; its
decarbonisation
strategy, the source for the Al Reyadah link; the
Masdar
green hydrogen pilot; the
TrueGreen
launch; the
FY2025
results; and its
Etihad
Rail supply announcement. This article is general information, not investment advice.